What I find most fascinating about your side projects is how you bring together a number of different skills in a way that looks almost effortless. Knocking out a search engine or a twitter reader as a throwaway learning project is one thing, but doing it over the course of little more than a week with a well designed UI in a way that ends up being useful in your own workflows? That not only takes some serious work but also the ability to correctly judge which directions not to go in, which can be one of the hardest aspects of developing software.

- I want real lists/arrays rather than Lua table-style data structures

- I need either pipelines (->>, |>) or class-style methods for ergonomics

- Testing and module system stories need a lot of work.

- Syntax quirks makes some kinds of nice constructs syntactically impossible or verbose (e.g. calling a fn defined on an object requires parenthesis to override the default order of operations)

I recently started hacking on a sort of "Ink 2.0" that preserves a lot of what I like about Ink (minimalism, lispy-ness, value rather than reference types, match expressions) without many of the design flaws. I might share and push that more publicly once I feel it's getting ready.

I think in general simple JavaScript applications can be remarkably fast these days if you're careful not to introduce unnecessary work and aware of the data structures you're using and profile + optimize judiciously :)